


Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies

by ishie



Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: Apocalypse, Community: apocalyptothon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-07
Updated: 2011-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-22 13:56:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a town full of unanswered questions, what's one more?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amaresu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaresu/gifts).



> Amaresu prompted "The most important question Haven has to answer during the apocalypse is this: Is this happening everywhere or just in Haven?"
> 
> ...this is not how I expected to answer that! Hope you like it, Amaresu. It was a dream come true to deal some non-canon death and destruction to a King-ian universe :) Takes place sometime after 2x04 "Sparks and Recreation" and, uh, takes some liberties with characters from another Stephen King story.
> 
> Thanks to inkdot and allthingsholy for all the moral support. All errors are my own; feel free to point them out!

There was a small crowd of people on the sidewalk at the bottom of the driveway when Nathan pulled up to the Burbages' house. He put the truck into park and let the engine idle while he scanned their faces.

Audrey followed his lead. Two or three people looked familiar enough to nudge at memories—their robes and pajamas less so—but no names came floating up. As small as Haven was, sometimes it seemed like there was no end to the population. Every week found her world expanding by at least half a dozen new people.

Not all of them made it into the next week, though.

Nathan nodded to himself, seemingly satisfied with the identities of the neighbors gawking at the various city and emergency vehicles clogging the street and driveway. He cut the ignition and sat back. Neither of them made a move to open the doors, though. Winter was still a few months off, but already the wind whipping in off the bay had enough bite to set their teeth to rattling.

Especially this early. The sky was just starting to go pink over the water when Audrey opened her door to Nathan's pounding. Her phone was still acting squirrelly after getting zapped by Lory, so until she had time to run it up to the Sprint store in Derry, she was depending instead on the old-fashioned handset Duke had unearthed from a pile of junk. The handset that only rang when it felt up to the task. Not that she was often home to answer, even when it did work. Between the everyday business of being a small-town cop and being a small-town cop in a town full of Troubles, it wasn't like she got far from the station to begin with.

"Did Laverne say who found the bodies?" she asked now. Her jaw ached with the urge to yawn, so she bolted down another shot of the cold coffee Nathan had delivered.

"Ayup."

"Were you planning on sharing?"

He grinned, a quick shot of teeth and crinkled skin.

All the heat fled the cab when he opened his door and climbed out. Audrey burrowed deeper into her coat and growled before going after him. Phil Platt caught them both at the graveled walkway up to the open front door of the house to give a quick rundown of the scene inside. His normally ruddy cheeks looked pale and waxy, like someone had replaced his face with a cheap plastic mask meant to look almost nothing like him. He'd only recently been transferred to an active beat in town from babysitting the speed trap on the north end. And, if she remembered right, this was probably the first time he was called to a suspicious death. And if it was because of the Troubles, there was no telling what weird and horrible thing he'd seen inside.

When Phil was done rattling off the details, Audrey handed him her half-empty travel mug and asked him to run up to the gas station for another cup of coffee. It was busywork, sure, and his ego might not thank her later, but he needed the break.

"Hot's all I need," she said when he asked how she took it.

Nathan looked insulted. "What, my coffee's not good enough?"

"Your coffee tastes like my shoes _after_ I fell in the harbor."

He rubbed his chin. "Beggars can't be choosers."

Audrey's only answer was a snort.

The house was a sturdy saltbox that had seen better days. The painted clapboard across the front was faded to a silvery gray. Several rows below the upper windows were cracked from water damage. The roofline sagged. One of the downspouts had worked its way loose and swayed in the breeze to _skreeeee_ against the house. The cars parked inside the open garage were new, though. Expensive, too. Nathan had said the Burbages were locals, but relatively new to the area. Ellen was a wildlife researcher who worked on one of the refuge islands while Paul ran the feed store left to him by a distant uncle a few decades earliers.

"Nice place," she said as the loose gravel skittered underfoot, sending her stumbling into the first of many slick patches of mud. The Burbages weren't much for maintenance of any kind, it seemed.

"Not bad," Nathan agreed, either missing her mocking tone or—more likely—deciding to ignore it. He wasn't much for snark before breakfast. "Good view."

It did have that, she saw once they were inside. Someone had knocked out most of the back wall of the living room, which now stretched through to the back of the house. A wall of windows framed the coast all the way from Tiumak Point down to the tip of the southernmost island at the mouth of the bay. Inside, the paint and furnishings echoed the same colors, the grays and blues of the water and the dark brown of the massive rock in the center of the room.

Or, they would, if everything weren't covered in a fine red mist of blood.

The rock was at least fifteen feet in diameter, probably more. It dwarfed everything else in the room: people, furniture, debris. Overhead, most of the ceiling, and the roof another ten feet above that, was torn to pieces. The ragged ends of two-by-fours stuck out into empty space. The brick chimney, somehow still intact, was visible from the first floor fireplace to the cap silhouetted against the steadily lightening sky. Dark chunks of tar and shingles littered the floor.

AJ, who'd been pressed into service as Chief Medical Examiner until they could replace Julia, was crouched next to the rock, prodding at the pulpy red and white mess just barely visible underneath. Audrey choked down the rush of bile and coffee that threatened to join it. Two green-faced patrolmen with blue paper booties over their boots stood at the far end of the room. Muffled crying and a soothing voice floated in from another room.

"That'd be the girl who found them," Nathan said. He fished out his phone and pulled up his text messages. "Name's Frannie. She's twenty or so. Laverne says she's up from UNH. Works for the Burbages as a nanny during the summer."

"Kinda late in the season for her to still be here, isn't it?"

He shrugged. "Maybe she's got a boyfriend."

"Maybe she's got a girlfriend."

"Maybe."

"Chief?" someone called.

One of the patrolmen—Ted, who'd been first on the scene—coughed loudly and excused himself from the room.

"Chief?"

Nathan kept scrolling through his phone when AJ called out to him. Audrey wondered if his sudden deafness was deliberate or if he still wasn't quite used to using his dad's title.

"Uh, Nathan?"

"Huh?"

Audrey pointed him toward AJ, who was still hunkered down over what used to be one—or more, her brain helpfully filled in—of the Burbages. He was holding up a flattened chunk of gold in an evidence bag.

"This is definitely Paul," AJ said. "I can still read part of the inscription. And from the size of this thing and the amount of spatter, I'd say Ellen's under here, too."

His face was smooth and unconcerned, the horror trained right out of him after two decades in Bangor and another five in Haven. Audrey wondered if there was anything that would rattle his composure.

Nathan cleared his throat. "What, uh, what about the kids?"

AJ shrugged. "Won't know until we get this thing out of here."

"Yeah, I'll call my guy." Catching Audrey's look, Nathan rephrased. "I'll call _a_ guy."

When he stepped back outside to make the call, Audrey asked, "Okay if I head back to talk to the girl?"

"Just don't step on anything," AJ warned.

"If you go through the dining room there," the remaining officer said, pointing to the doorway to Audrey's left, "you'll come out in the kitchen. Stan's trying to get her calmed down."

He kept his eyes firmly pointed upward, to the sky visible beyond the wreck of the house. Audrey gave him a smile of thanks anyway and slipped out of the living room.

The kitchen was bright and cheery, with pale yellow walls and expensive-looking appliances. There was a wide window over the sink that looked into the yard behind the garage. The wall opposite the dining room had a closed door and a cork-board covered in kid's drawings and activity schedules. Open pantry shelves took up most of the remaining wall.

Stan was sitting on a stool at the island counter, next to a redheaded girl who was wrapped in a blanket and sniffling into a wad of tissues. When he saw Audrey in the doorway, he got up to meet her.

"She says she got in around three and came in through the garage, here." He pointed to a door Audrey had missed, tucked into the corner nearest the dining room. "Her bedroom's back there behind the kitchen. Went straight in, fell asleep, woke up some time later and everything was shaking."

"From the rock?"

"That's my guess. She went into the living room, saw the, uh..." He coughed into his elbow, excused himself, and looked down at his notepad. "The scene. Called 911 right away, she says. When Ted got here she was sitting on the curb out front. It took us some doing to get her to come back inside."

"Have the medics taken a look at her yet?"

He nodded. "Mild shock. Gave her a blanket, told me to keep her out of the way. I didn't ask her anything, just let her talk when she felt like it."

"Good job," Audrey told him. He puffed up like she'd just handed him a commendation. Ever since the business with Chris, he'd been on his best behavior, trying to make up for countermanding her order to keep him at the station. It was starting to get a little annoying.

"Uh, the chief's out front trying to round up a crew to get the rock out," she said. "Why don't you go check with him to see if you're clear to take Frannie back to the station?"

Nathan wouldn't care one way or the other. He deferred to Audrey whenever they had to deal with witnesses, given her ability to connect with even the most Troubled. But it would get Stan out of her hair while she tried to draw the details out of the girl.

Stan practically tied himself in a knot in his rush to comply. Audrey waited until the garage door closed behind him then sat on the stool he'd abandoned. She laid a hand on the girl's arm and smiled. For whatever reason, it came more easily than any of the others she'd forced out that morning.

"Frannie?" When the girl nodded, she said, "I'm Officer Parker. You can call me Audrey. I know you already talked to Ted and Stan a little bit, but I was hoping you could tell me what happened here, too." She needed to find out where the kids were but didn't want to push too hard. It could have been Frannie who had somehow dropped the rock onto the Burbage house. Her first priority was to keep the girl calm so she didn't put anyone else in danger.

"But first, is there anyone we can call for you? Your mom or dad? A boyfriend or girlfriend?"

There was a long moment of silence, then Frannie's face seemed to fold in on itself. She hunched her shoulders forward and coughed wetly into her fist. The tissues dropped to the counter, ragged where the girl had worried the edges. Audrey pushed them away with one finger then swept a hand across Frannie's shoulders, trying to give what comfort she could as their only witness dissolved into shuddering sobs.

\---

By the time Stan returned to take Frannie to the station, Audrey hadn't learned much more than she already knew. The Burbages' sons, Jeff and Ollie, shared one of the two bedrooms upstairs. The other was Paul and Ellen's. Both were completely destroyed by the rock's path through the house. If everyone had been home, as Frannie seemed to think they were, they were all dead.

A chainsaw roared in the living room where Dwight was cutting through the front wall of the house. There was no other way to get the massive stone out, except to roll it out.

"I could try to bust it up in here," he'd offered, with what Audrey thought was a little too unhealthy of an enthusiasm. "It's good solid granite but there's a good cleaving plane right about here...."

If nothing else, Dwight had at least finally found something to crack AJ's composure. Nathan and Audrey left them to argue about the preservation of the human remains in the room.

"Ted and Phil are canvassing the neighbors to see if anyone heard anything," Nathan told her. "What'd you get out of the girl?"

"Not much," she admitted. "I don't think she caused this, though. She's totally wrecked, had nothing but nice things to say about all the Burbages."

They'd reached the end of the driveway by then. Most of the crowd had dispersed, back into their homes to get ready for a day in which they would spread the news far and fast. Ted and Phil were talking with a few of the stragglers on the corner, but it looked more like they were the ones getting grilled for information instead of the other way around. When Phil noticed Nathan and Audrey on the sidewalk, he cupped a hand around his mouth and shouted in a hoarse voice, "Coffee's in my cruiser!"

He pointed, in case they were having trouble finding it. Audrey waved and retrieved her travel mug. The air had warmed considerably since they first arrived—and this coffee was almost as cold as the one she'd handed him to begin with—but she gave him an enthusiastic thumbs-up after taking a drink.

Nathan bounced his knuckles on the hood of his truck. "Better?"

"Oh, _so much_ ," Audrey drawled.

When the truck pulled out onto Witcham, Audrey saw Stan's cruiser making the turn onto Twin Pines in the distance. They'd lingered at the house long enough to give the other car enough of a head start that Frannie would be all settled by the time they arrived. Calm was the order of the day; the last thing Audrey wanted was for the girl to get any more agitated. If she'd called down the giant rock, whether she meant to or not, she was a danger to everyone in town.

"So, is it her?" Nathan asked, as if he could hear Audrey's thoughts tumbling against each other.

"I don't know," she said, still considering. "She's pregnant."

"And?"

"Twenty, still in school, unmarried, from a small town? Does any of that say anything to you?"

"Uh," he stalled, his eyebrows coming together in a frown. "Not good?"

"From what Frannie said, I think it's about as not-good as it gets for her."

He pulled up to a stop sign and looked over at her. "Was it," he started to say, jerking a thumb over his shoulder in the approximate direction of the Burbage house.

"No, some guy from school. Jess, Jesse, something. He's from around here. That's who she was with last night."

Nathan made a noise like a hum, then threw a hand over his nose and mouth and sneezed. Audrey grabbed a wad of napkins out of the glovebox and passed them over.

Frannie had told her more than that, of course. That when she'd met her boyfriend on the beach and told him about the baby, he'd grabbed her arm so hard he left a ring of bruises. Before she could tell Nathan, his phone chimed with an incoming text message. He pulled it from his coat pocket and cursed. Tossing the phone to Audrey, he gunned the engine and shot down the hill toward Twin Pines.

<< _Officer involved accident, King and Trumbull. All units respond_ >>

\---

There was nothing left of the cruiser but a crushed plastic bumper lying next to the huge rock that was half-buried in the street outside the bait shop. A twin to the one lodged in the Burbages living room, it had apparently fallen straight out of the clear sky to land on Stan and Frannie as they idled at the stoplight. The two old men who'd been trading gossip on the bait shop's front porch swore up and down that they'd neither seen nor heard anything until the rock crashed through the upper branches of the butternut tree whose branches nearly spanned the street. Seconds later, only the top two-thirds of it were visible above the asphalt.

Nathan was practically vibrating, pacing up and down the street with his hands on his hips. Stan was the first officer casualty since he'd taken over for the Chief. They'd both joined the force at the same time, graduated high school together. Audrey was having trouble enough trying to tamp down the shock and horror. She'd been feeling faint ever since the truck squealed to a stop in the intersection. She couldn't imagine how he was even functioning.

Nathan finally stopped pacing. He stood with his back to the rock. Shoulders and head down, arms dangling a little, like fighting against gravity was just too much work. His face was drawn and pale, his eyes almost feverishly bright. He cleared his throat once, then again.

"We need to find that boyfriend," he said at last.

\---

The atmosphere in the truck cab was grim, almost electric with Nathan's anger. He was deaf to Audrey's arguments that he let her take the lead, that he wait in the truck while she tried to talk to the young man.

Once they found him, that was. She hadn't gotten a last name out of Frannie in their brief talk in the kitchen and not even Laverne recognized the first. Instead they'd detoured around the accident site, where Dwight had already sent a second crew to start working on the rock, and headed downtown to the police station.

For the next few hours, Nathan tried to get someone from the high school on the phone. Even on a Saturday it shouldn't have been impossible, but he hit brick walls with everything he tried. It was as if half the town had suddenly disappeared.

In the office they used to share, Audrey called the Ogunquit cops to see what they knew about the girl's family. If possible, she was hoping to convince someone there to do the death notification in person. It really wasn't the kind of news she thought they should get over the phone.

But no one was answering, in either place. She could hear Nathan roaring from his office, ordering whoever was available to find someone who could help him find the kid. Every outburst was followed by a hacking cough that sounded like it was getting worse by the minute.

The tickle in Audrey's throat started to get a little more active and she couldn't fight back her own cough.

She hung up the phone and turned back to her laptop. She'd gone through every number listed on the homepage for the Ogunquit Police, and all of them she could find on the city and county government sites. She'd even tried the State Police outpost and gotten nothing but a fast busy signal.

"Laverne!" she called as she stepped out of her office. The back of her throat tickled when she raised her voice. "Is there something wrong with our phone lines?"

"Everything's fine as far as I can tell," was the answer. "This damn thing's been ringing off the hook all day. I don't have enough officers to respond to all of this." The heavyset dispatcher waved a stack of incident reports. "Some kinda hailstorm's been hitting in just about every damn corner of town, another _six_ of those boulders have been reported, and somebody says the pancake house is completely buried under a pile of rubble."

After a quick puff on her artificial cigarette, Laverne croaked, "Don't tell Nathan about that one. He's not going to take it so good."

"What the hell is going on?" Audrey wondered aloud. Had this Jesse kid realized what he'd done? Had the attack on Frannie sent him over the edge? It was far from the first time grief sent one of the Troubled into a tailspin that threatened the whole town.

"I don't know," Laverne started to say, "but..."

The phone rang again and she clicked the button on the headset to answer. "Haven PD, what's your—"

As Audrey watched, all the blood drained out of the older woman's face.

"What is it? Laverne, what's wrong?"

Instead of answering, Laverne ripped the headset off and pushed her rolling chair across the room to where a small TV perched on the edge of a desk. It was an old set, rigged up with a digital antenna so it would still get broadcast signals. The sound kicked in before the picture had finished warming up: the long low tone of the emergency broadcast system. It brought Nathan out of his office. He walked like he was half-asleep. The skin under his eyes was dark and his throat looked swollen, almost puffy. His cough sounded painful, like his lungs were trying to make a break for it.

The emergency broadcast tone cut off abruptly, as if someone couldn't take it anymore. Audrey could sympathize. Onscreen, a plain blue wall faded up into view and the camera angle swung down to reveal a wooden podium. An American flag hung limply off to one side. The seal of the President on the front of the podium flared bright white under the lights.

Laverne sucked in a quick breath. Audrey did the same and set off a coughing fit that left her weak and light-headed. Next to them, Nathan dropped into an empty chair. He looked a decade older than he had that morning, like the life was slowly draining out of him. His breathing was rapid and congested; what she'd thought was a summer cold sounded like it was progressing a lot faster than it should. She had to fold her hands together behind her back to keep from testing his temperature. It was obvious he was running a fever from the slight flush on his face and neck.

There was a brief scuffle of noise on the TV, then silence again. Outside there was a loud rumble. Through the windows, Audrey saw another huge boulder come hurtling out of the sky to land on a house across the street. It collapsed like matchsticks around the hole the rock left and she shuddered.

 _They're coming for us_ , she thought wildly. Her cough came again, stronger this time, bringing up a gob of mucus with it for the first time. She spat it into the trashcan and tried to ignore the look she got from Laverne.

When she looked back at the TV, the Vice President was shuffling a few papers on top of the podium. His skin was flushed and feverish-looking. He looked like he'd lost weight, his jowls even more pronounced than usual.

Nathan bent over double with a horrible gagging cough that drowned out the Vice President's first words. Laverne turned up the volume.

"—regret to inform you," he was saying, "that the United States is under attack—"

The rest of his words were lost in the burst of white noise that exploded in Audrey's ears. She sagged against the nearest wall and coughed again. The tickle in her throat had become a full-fledged fire; every breath seemed to swell her lungs to the point of bursting but she was having trouble sucking in enough air to fight off the dizzy feeling.

"The President succumbed to this virus—" she heard, as if at the other end of a long tunnel. The room tilted crazily, bringing Laverne's nicotine inhaler into view where she'd dropped it on the linoleum. Nathan's head was practically on top of it where he had apparently collapsed on the floor. A thick string of mucus was smeared across his cheek. Audrey tried to kneel and the floor dropped away from her entirely.

Her name echoed through the tunnel. Bright sparks on the edges of her vision where the blackness was creeping in. Something echoed in the distance, like a shot, and the floor tried to throw her off with a long, low shimmy.

She tried to say something, to call for help as another cough welled up inside her. She couldn't stop it, feeling like it started in her feet and rolled upward, catching her lungs in its wake and trying to pull them out through the top of her head.

A roaring filled her ears and the floor slid away again, toward the sucking hole where the sky had replaced the ceiling, and gray-streaked black took its place.


End file.
